the full monty (season 1)

It was purely by chance that I happened to revisit The Full Monty earlier this year - unaware that the cast had literally been reassembled Avengers-style for an impending follow-up series - and found it just as charming as it was upon release 25 years ago. The streaming iteration, however, proves a decidedly odd duck… and not only because it’s been entirely (and understandably) divorced from the original’s steelworkers-turned-strippers premise. The show is buoyed by an irreverent whimsy, full of unapologetically broad, sitcom-style hi-jinks (there’s a dog-napping plot connected to Britain’s Got Talent; a get-rich scheme involving racing pigeons and a Korean billionaire; and a hostage situation at the local job center that devolves into darkly comic folly)… but it also has a deep-rooted melancholy that pierces the film’s protective layer of fantasy hard and unforgivingly.

Part of the movie’s sweet-natured appeal was recognizing, deep down, that a striptease performance was unlikely to alter the hardscrabble lives of its characters in any significant way… and yet, as their moment of triumph was immortalized in freeze frame, we could pretend that it somehow did. But, as the show makes abundantly clear… it didn’t. If anything, working class Sheffield has become even more depressive in the ensuing quarter-century (the club where they performed has long since been shuttered). Gaz (Robert Carlyle), still cavalierly lives life day-by-day, always on the lookout for his next scheme and trying not to screw up his relationship with teenage daughter Destiny (Talitha Wing, a real asset) too badly. Dave (Mark Addy) and Jean (Lesley Sharp) are still married, but their attempt to start a family years ago ended in tragedy and they’ve never really recovered (Jean asks him point blank if there’s anything in his life he takes pride in). Lomper (Steve Huison) runs a semi-struggling cafe with his husband Dennis (Paul Clayton), but feels largely ineffectual in the relationship. Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) is basically limited to a handful of cameos within the cafe, quipping in a voice that sounds like warmed over death (seriously, Wilkinson appears in shockingly poor health - though if anything is going on, he’s done a good job keeping it private… either way, it’s unfortunate, given that he was arguably the best thing about the original). The saddest figure, however, is probably Horse (Paul Barber), aging and physically debilitated, doing his best to keep his spirits up in spite of constantly falling through the cracks thanks to a social services system that’s as uncaring as it is ineffective (Hugo Speer’s Guy, meanwhile, has limited screentime and abruptly disappears from the series altogether - supposedly due to accusations of inappropriate conduct on-set). In spite of going gray, Carlyle maintains his general boyishness; there’s no denying, however, that the cast (not to sound harsh) has otherwise aged rather starkly. It renders the undercurrent of their ongoing struggles that much more doleful.  ​

Original screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who created and wrote the series along with Alice Nutter (formerly of Chumbawamba - yes, *that* Chumbawamba), made the somewhat debatable decision to build each episode almost entirely around a single character… which results in certain plot threads crisping unevenly. At first, Dave - who works as a caretaker at the badly neglected Sheffield Spires Academy (where Jean is the headteacher) - becoming a father figure of sorts to a bullied student (lessening his own paternal void ever-so-slightly in the process) feels like the relatable heart of the series… but the relationship is barely touched upon beyond the second episode. On the other hand, it’s a new addition to the cast - Miles Jupp, as the wincing bureaucrat Darren - who lands arguably the most well-rounded storyline, in which he finds unexpected happiness with a Kurdish refugee and her teenage son (speaking of offspring, Gaz’s son Nathan from the film is all grown up, and a policeman to boot, but he and his family mostly get the short shrift… one too many characters jockeying for screentime, it would seem). Without the stripping scheme to hold focus, the series tends to wander; it’s a good thing the cast remains so uniformly likable (it’s hard to tell if Gaz’s impishness is more or less exasperating now that he’s in his 60s, but this older, more weatherworn version of Dave gives Mark Addy a clear opportunity to shine). This new iteration of The Full Monty lurches between the farcical and the funereal, between easy levity and social didacticism and yet, in a weird way, that’s sort of its appeal. It has the rutted rhythm of life itself - the triumphs and setbacks, the jolts of joy and tugs of sadness, the cyclical interplay between absurdity and heartbreak. For an oddball continuation of one of the more unlikely breakout hits of the 90s, there’s a certain imperfect satisfaction in that, at least.